A Week With “a McDonald’s sign” from The Tower by Xiaofu Wang - Week 010

On looking at a photograph of a room that outlived its purpose

Apr 28, 2026

For the past week I’ve returned to this photograph of an empty interior in The Tower by Xiaofu Wang. Light barges through the windows filling a space sitting amongst heavy silence. It is an emptiness that never feels truly bare because it carries the weight of expectation. Chairs gather like absent bodies. Furniture is stored waiting for the moment to be brought back into service. The red of the carpet, a symbol of a grand gesture, glows against the walls as if the building has spent decades blushing for the ambitions that were projected upon it, still waiting.

The interior is one of many from inside of the Genex Tower, a 36-story skyscraper in Belgrade, Serbia. Designed in 1977 by Mihajlo Mitrović and completed in 1979, it stood as the tallest building in Serbia for 42 years, greeting people arriving in the city from the West. It’s formed by two towers connected with a two-story bridge and restaurant at top. One side housing residents, the other serving as headquarters for the Genex Group, Yugoslavua’s largest state-owned foreign trade company. Its brutalist design reflected an ideology made physical, raw concrete as honesty, collective ambition made visible. It embodied Tito’s hope for a third way between Soviet communism and Western capitalism, a statement that Yugoslavia could compete with the West while remaining independent. What it has become is something else entirely. As Sonja Jankov writes in The Tower, “Once the symbol and the headquarters of the country’s international connections, it has become a giant billboard.”

The first time I looked at Wang’s photograph, the McDonald’s sign tucked away on the right of the frame, registered as something familiar, a beacon of recognizability for an American such as myself. It was the one thing I could ground my initial reading on for such a foreign and unknown interior, building, and project. Returning to the photograph throughout the week, the smile of the golden arches began to expose itself as the most legible symbol for the replacement of autonomy.

McDonald’s arrived in Yugoslavia in 1988, one of the first fast food chains to open in a socialist country, through a joint venture with the The Genex Group itself. The institution built to prove Yugoslavia could compete with the West on its own terms became the vehicle through which American consumer culture entered the country. The familiarity of McDonald’s is built on the standardization, replicability, and control. It is a constant that many Americans who grew up with the brand associate with something close to comfort, a reliable landmark in a world of perpetual flux. But that sameness comes at a cost. The sameness that McDonald’s perfected has become the organizing principle of modern life, one that leaves little room for the kind of specific, unrepeatable ambition the Genex Tower was built to express.

The sign in this photograph is familiar to me. I grew up and was formed inside the thing that the McDonald’s sign represents. That familiarity is what makes the image complicated to look at. Many Americans encounter the expansion of American consumer culture abroad as a neutral, or even positive, endeavor. One that harkens a global reach of shared taste. Wang’s photograph shows the inside of a building that was designed as an explicit alternative, and knowing what came after, knowing that Yugoslavia collapsed, and learning how the Genex Tower project dissolved, the sign’s familiarity becomes evidence. The red carpet that once announced arrival and ceremony now reads differently. It is the color of ambition turned to wound.

The ideological contradiction does not only live in the building. It lives in the institution that built it and then partnered with what it was attempting to resist. It lives in the eye of the viewer, mine trained by the same consumer logic the sign represents. That is the uncomfortable position the photograph puts an American viewer in, not the outside view of a critic surveying the damage but the inside view of someone who is also implicated. Baudrillard wrote that what replaced collective agency was not freedom but its simulation. You can choose between a Big Mac and a Quarter Pounder. But what is already chosen for you is the menu.

The building is the one thing in this situation that has made little compromise. It did not fall. What it meant dissolved around it, but it remains patiently holding the memory of what it was asked to be, and watching to see what comes next.

“a McDonald’s sign” is from The Tower by Xiaofu Wang. Published by Nearest Truth in 2024.

Link to Xiaofu Wang’s website:
https://xiaofuwang.info/

Link to the book:
https://www.nearesttrutheditions.com/books/p/the-tower-xiaofu-wang

A Week With is a weekly writing series focused on a single image from my art and photobook library. I spend seven days returning to the image and write about what it brings into focus about culture and the present moment.